Dad’s Tavern Chili Recipe

Cook Eat Share

65 mins (prep 25, cooking 40)

18 ingredients

8 servings

As an adolescent I was commissioned by my dad to make a huge pot of chili for his tavern weekly, and I earned fifty cents a batch doing so! (This was before the era of food safety regulation and inspection - I just made it in our home kitchen!) Dad had taught me how to make his chili, and everyone agreed it was in a class of its own. I hadn’t thought much about it and certainly never tried to replicate it for the past 60 years or so, and now some of the ingredients are either unavailable or non-existent. But this week I started thinking about the old times and wondered if I still “had it in me” to make that wonderful chili. This recipe is about one third of that humongous kettle I made back then, stays close to my memories of how it was made, and tastes nearly the same. Dad would be proud of me if he were here to sample it. (But my price for making it today for him would be inflation-adjusted LOL!)